John Barker
Northern News Services

Inuvik (Sep 16/02) - New equipment installed in Inuvik will help climate scientists better understand global warming.

It doesn't seem like much: an ordinary sensing device in a plain white box, but for researcher Philip Marsh, it's an important step toward understanding climate change at the local level.

"We do a pretty good job seeing bigger patterns when it comes to looking at climate and global warming, but we still have trouble predicting what that means over a small local area -- say like here in Inuvik," said Marsh, of Environment Canada's National Water Research Institute in Saskatoon.

The weather station is housed in a Stevenson screen at the Aurora Research Institute. It houses a thermohygrograph, one of the most basic tools in environmental science. Basically, it's a cylindrical drum that measures and registers temperature and relative humidity over a seven-day period.

The new equipment is part of the Mackenzie River Basin Study (MAGS), which has fed information to the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiments (GEWEX) study since 1994.

Marsh said the Mackenzie study is considered a "continental-scale experiment." Similar experiments are underway in Australia, the Baltic Sea, and Brazil.

By studying the snow and ice processes, as well as radiation interactions, and Arctic clouds, scientists have concluded the Mackenzie River Basin is "experiencing a distinct warming trend."

Marsh has been coming to the Inuvik area for research for more than 20 years.

Environment Canada donated the weather station to the Aurora Research Institute.